Helen Garner speaks with Kerry O'Brien

Transcript

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KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Helen Garner began her literary life writing fiction, but has enhanced her already considerable reputation in the past 15 years with powerful and provocative non fiction, including The First Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation. But with The Spare Room published last month, she's back with fiction, though strongly drawn; it seems, from real life. The narrator for instance is called Helen and sounds familiar.

Garner tackles the heartbreak topic of caring for a dying friend who comes to stay for three excruciatingly intense weeks, a time marked by huge compassion, grief, humour, a lot of pain and great waves of anger. Helen Garner is in Sydney for the Writers' Festival and I spoke with her this week. Helen Garner, this is your first work of fiction for more than a decade and yet, it seems so closely based in reality and the Helen in the book is so identifiably close to you, where does the fiction come in?

HELEN GARNER, AUTHOR, THE SPARE ROOM: Well by calling it fiction, well, I had a particular purpose in mind which was to differentiate it from the work I've been doing for the last 15 years or however long it is, the non fiction I've done. I wanted to sort of run that flag up the pole and say, "Do not read this as memoir, I've taken all the liberties I needed to take to free myself of the contract that you would normally have with a reader and it was non fiction". Also, it felt like fiction when I was writing it. I felt freer and more able to yeah, invent.

KERRY OBRIEN: There is a great compassion but also great anger directed by Helen in the book to her dying friend Nicola. Helen says, "A wave of sickening rage struck through me and I wanted to smash the car through the post but for only her to die." And as you walk through the door at home, "anger and fear rigidly suppressed, sang in the air." Now is that what it was like in real life? Because I know you've been through a similar experience with a dying friend?

HELEN GARNER: Yes, I have, and she's not the only person, friend on whom the character of Nicola is based is not the only person whose death I've been involved in, or near.

KERRY OBRIEN: Your sister, as well?

HELEN GARNER: My sister, both my parents, so I um, I'm aware of the very complicated feelings that people who are caring for dying ones can suffer from. It's very shocking I think for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief, it's a kind of raging against what's happening. And it's particularly hard to deal with if the person who's dying is unable to acknowledge that they're dying. So then there's a terrible feeling of untruthfulness and bad faith that grows up between even people who deeply love each other.

KERRY OBRIEN: It seems a part of your persona that you're a very questioning person. You're very questioning of yourself, you're very questioning of others. You say in the book, "death will not be denied, to try is grandiose", but given that it is the final great personal challenge in life and perhaps the toughest, why can't one rage against the night rather than go gently into it?"

HELEN GARNER: The character in my book neither rages nor goes gently, she's not even prepared to do one of those. She's in a state of advanced terror. She's paralysed with terror, and at first, this terrible state of fear provokes pity and anguish in the narrating voice, the narrating Helen. But then, I think it's much more complex than just Helen being furious with Nicola. I think the whole matter of the alternative treatment that Nicola rushes for and allows herself to be ripped off to pay for a tremendous force in the story, a force that drives Helen completely round the twist. It's a terrible thing to see a helpless person being preyed upon and tortured.

KERRY OBRIEN: And you've seen that?

HELEN GARNER: Yes, I have. And I've also read about it.

KERRY OBRIEN: One of the most powerful moments in the book is when Nicola's defiance in the face of death cracks and she says,"But see, all my life I've never wanted to bore people with the way I feel. No one wants to know about if I'm sad or frightened. I've learnt to shut up and present an optimistic face." It doesn't come through as self pity to me, but she thinks her life's been wasted. You obviously see that as a terrible fear for a person facing death, the fear of life being wasted?

HELEN GARNER: Well, people I've talked to, people who work in palliative care and therapists and nurses that I know say that's often the case, that if people feel as death approaches that they're full of unfulfilled longings or ambitions or hopes, that this can make facing death even more difficult for them, because they're full of regrets. As you hear other stories about people who die calmly and um, who, well my own sister was an example of this. She was quite a prickly, difficult person. But when she was told that she had an inoperable cancer, she somehow accepted it with the most extraordinary grace and so it was very easy to care for her, it was lovely to be with her and something transformed in her. Something hard softened, and I think in the case of the character Nicola in my book, something that was soft has hardened and she's rigidly clenched around her terror. It's very hard to deal with that.

KERRY OBRIEN: Now despite all the rage of the book, my feeling is that Helen would have walked away from that experience much more fulfilled than if she hadn't gone through it, even with all the pain?

HELEN GARNER: Oh, I'm sure that's true. There's also a certain amount of guilt in the book. I mean, that final scene where the narrating Helen hands over Nicola to her family, where she basically can't hack it another minute for complicated reasons explained in the book, but the last sentence of the book says, "It was the end of my watch and I handed her over" and so in one sense, there's a relief at the end of that watch, and that that watch was so extreme that it was too much for one person to handle. But there's also a kind of sorrow and just not exactly a feeling of failure, but perhaps a feeling that she wished she had done more. But what situation is there in the world where one doesn't think one should have done more?

KERRY OBRIEN: You've talked about the difficulty of resolving how and where Nicola dies in the end and the enormous wave of emotion you felt when you finally solved the problem in one great rush of writing. Can you tell that story?

HELEN GARNER: I got to the point where Nicola finally goes back to Sydney and then I thought, "What do I do now? I've got to get to the death? I can't leave the reader, I have to write the death as well". I tried it this way and that way, I tried crawling slowly day to day to the death. I realised when I was in complete despair and about to give up, it suddenly struck me I could do it in a flash forward and then sort of stitch it into the coat of the book, as it were. So I rushed back to the room and I knocked it out in, I suppose it took me a couple of hours and I'm a slow writer. But I knocked it out and suddenly there it was and then I lay on the floor and howled for ages and then I just neatly stitched it in.

KERRY OBRIEN: What was the howling about? Just relief?

HELEN GARNER: Relief, but just the pain of someone you love dying and, and trying to form that awful experience, it's a huge experience to care for someone who's dying and I wanted to, I needed to write the book partly to contain it in some way so it wouldn't leave me in this chaos of sorrow.

KERRY OBRIEN: With everything that you now have behind you and with what you still have to look ahead to, are you content? Has yours been a life not wasted?

HELEN GARNER: I hope. I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life and that is I've got some grandchildren. You can't overestimate the kind of opening to the future that gives a person, I think. You sometimes think, "Well, OK, that's something I've done and they're walking around over there and when I die they're going to be still walking around over there, God willing" and that's a wonderful feeling of freedom.